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The November Business Bookshelf: Books to Help Your Business Grow

Posted on by Penguin India

What does it take to bring your business to new heights? What are some of the key factors that will guarantee success? What are the changes you can make in yourself and how can you guide those who work with you?
This November we’ve put together a list of books that will tell you how to take your business to success through tips, facts and true stories. Take a look!
A Game Changer’s Memoir

A masterful strategist, GN Bajpai, in this book, recounts his truly inspiring journey as he weaved through complex rules and frameworks in his efforts to turn SEBI into an effective financial regulator for the country. Easy-flowing and readable with the writer’s anecdotal and educative style of writing and yet greatly comprehensive, this is a go-to book for a new generation of aspiring financial groundbreakers.
The Tata Saga

The Tata Saga is a collection of handpicked stories published on India’s most iconic business group. The anthology features snippets from the lives of various business leaders of the company: Ratan Tata, J.R.D. Tata, Jamsetji Tata, Xerxes Desai, Sumant Moolgaokar, F.C. Kohli, among others. There are tales of outstanding successes, crushing failures and extraordinary challenges that faced the Tata Group.
Compassion Inc

In this book, Gaurav Sinha, world-class businessman and entrepreneur, founder of Insignia in 2003, outlines the economics of empathy for life and for business. He offers actionable solutions to maintaining a successful trade in a changing global landscape where conscience, ethics and authenticity are high on the agenda. The world is changing, perceptions are shifting, consumers are evolving and this book will ensure your business keeps up.
Stories at Work

Storytelling in business is different from telling stories to friends in a bar. It needs to be based on facts. Stories at Work will teach you how to wrap your stories in context and deliver them in a way that grabs your audience’s attention.

 

10 Revealing Facts about Rape from Sohaila Abdulali’s Book ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape’

Posted on by Penguin India

Rape and sexual assault have become commonplace, but lingering questions still remain. Drawing on exchanges with many survivors, Sohaila Abdulali, a survivor herself, looks at how we – women, men, politicians, teachers, writers, sex workers, feminists, sages, mansplainers, victims and families – think about rape and what we say and what we don’t say.
This book is a must-read in order to normalize conversation around rape. Here’s why.
Rape has different connotations for men and women
‘A bad sexual experience for a man is more likely to be a missed communication, sexual frustration and a sour aftertaste, whereas for a woman the menu is statistically more likely to include humiliation, pregnancy, rape and death.’

~

Shattering the good-girl stereotype
‘What makes a “good girl”? Too often being good means being docile, passive, accepting your lot without question. I hope, in that case, for a new generation of only bad girls, who listen to themselves and follow their own hearts. And get up and straddle their lovers with abandon.’

~

Self-blame becomes an unhealthy coping mechanism
‘Maybe self-blame isn’t always about self-hatred and internalized patriarchy. Maybe sometimes it’s a convoluted way of making the whole thing less scary.’

~

Speak up about rape, when conducive
‘Keeping quiet about rape has a whole other toxic effect: it lets abusers off the hook. I want to be very clear that it is never the victim’s obligation to speak up, or report, or do anything but survive. Her first responsibility is getting through it. But we are all culpable in the silence around rape, a “vast international conspiracy” if there ever was one.’

~

Destigmatize the act
‘It’s going to be a long time until rape is so stigma-free that there’s no penalty for speaking out as a survivor. Sometimes the penalty is to be pigeonholed, somehow diminished.’

~

Revolution is led by mass dissent
‘The #MeToo campaign made it impossible to ignore the scope of sexual harassment and rape, at the same time as we were treated to some unsavoury glimpses of rape culture.’

~

No means no, irrespective of role
‘Being a sex worker doesn’t mean you deserve to be raped. Neither does being a spouse.’

~

Make men accountable
‘We choose to blame each other, maybe out of misogyny, maybe simply out of fear, forgetting, as we do so, that there is someone else in the picture who also has a choice: a man who can choose between decency and dominance.’

~

Consent can have undefined, blurred lines
‘So often we tend to talk about the victims and the ways they went along with, or took advantage of, or kept suspiciously quiet about, rape. They didn’t leap up and stab the man and go running out clutching their clothes to their outraged bosoms, therefore they consented.’

~

Creating healthy boundaries
‘It blurs boundaries, or it can clarify them. Although I paid for my rape in many other ways, it actually helped me draw very clear boundaries, and for that I’ve always been grateful. Not to the rapists, of course, but just to whatever contrarian gene I have that hates being told what to do.’

In What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali asks pertinent questions: Is rape always a life-defining event? Does rape always symbolize something? Is rape worse than death? Is rape related to desire? Who gets raped? Is rape inevitable? Is one rape worse than the other? Who rapes? What is consent? How do you recover a sense of safety and joy? How do you raise sons? Who gets to judge?
 

‘Five letter word’- Struggles faced by the invisible men of India

Posted on by Penguin India

Female-to-male transgender people, or transmasculine people as they are called, are just beginning to form their networks in India. But their struggles are not visible to a gender-normative society that barely notices, much less acknowledges, them. While transwomen have gained recognition through the extraordinary efforts of activists and feminists, the brotherhood, as the transmasculine network often refers to itself, remains imponderable, diminished even within the transgender community. For all intents and purposes, they do not exist. In a country in which parents wish their daughters were sons, they exile the daughters who do become sons.
Here are 7 of the many struggles of transmen in India, quoted from Nandini Krishnan’s book, Invisible Men: Inside India’s Transmasculine Network:
Fear of the unfamiliar
While transwomen have had a peripheral presence in the public sphere, transmen have been conspicuous by their absence.
“All of us were terrified of the transwomen we encountered, at traffic signals and on beaches and on trains, clapping their hands boisterously, demanding money, and threatening to lift their skirts or feel up the boys unless they were paid.” “So alien is the concept of transmen to the world that even when I explain they are female-to-male (FTM) and not male-to-female (MTF), the typical response is a puzzled, ‘But then why do they wear saris?’”

~

The language of otherness
The alienation of transmen is further aggravated by ‘offensive’ vocabulary that floats around and enters our psyche.
“The term ‘transgender’ is largely acceptable as an umbrella term, but ‘gender change’ could be deeply offensive. To say someone was ‘trapped’ or ‘had the wrong body’ could be offensive too. I met a transman who was deeply hurt because a psychiatrist had written that he ‘suffered’ from gender dysphoria. He did not like referring to his transition as ‘treatment’, because, he said, ‘I’m not ill’.”

~

Disembodied souls or soulless bodies?
Society’s denial of non-binary gender is ruptured by misplaced curiosity that doesn’t allow any integration of form and soul.
Gee Semmalar observes “‘There’s a kind of voyeurism that is involved in piecing together our lives. We’re like lab rats. You place us on the table and you dissect us and you see what our bodies look like and how our bodies change and what surgeries are being done’.”

~

Culturally legitimized violence
“Many of them have been victims of forced marriage, even rape. Nearly all have been victims of some form of physical or emotional violence. Not one person told me he had never contemplated suicide. All of them had friends who committed suicide.”

~

The unobtainable organ
“ (…)the fact is that the gender reassignment or sex reassignment surgeries that a lot of transmen opt for are limited to uterus and ovary removal and top surgery, because the phalloplasty or the metoidioplasty for construction of a penis is not a very well-developed surgery in India. The surgery is complicated, and prohibitively expensive.”

~

The circus of certification
“If the invisibility of transmen from public life puts them at a disadvantage, their invisibility in law cripples them. Largely invisible in terms of national advocacy, they sometimes have trouble convincing officials they exist.” The Supreme Court of India “allows one to self-identify with a particular gender, irrespective of what his or her birth certificate, hormones, or surgical history say.” However, “Many have paid bribes they could barely afford to get their documents falsified.”

~

The schism within

“Several transmen told me that because the Transgender Boards (…) comprised mainly transwomen, there was some gatekeeping within the community. ‘They don’t want what is already a small piece of the pie sliced up even further, so you have transwomen putting up all kinds of hierarchies of authenticity, saying transwomen who are post-operative are the most genuine, most authentic and most deserving transwomen and at the bottom of the totem pole are transmen (…).’”

Read Nandini Krishnan’s ‘Invisible Men’ as she investigates this seismic activity and brings it up from the depths to the surface.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Bridge of Clay – an excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Here is a story told inside out and back to front:
The five Dunbar brothers are living – fighting, dreaming, loving – in the perfect squalor of a house without grownups. Today, the father who walked out on them long ago is about to walk right back in.
But why has he returned, and who have the boys become in the meantime?
Here is an excerpt from Markus Zusak’s new book, Bridge of Clay

IN THE BEGINNING there was one murderer, one mule and one boy, but this isn’t the beginning, it’s before it, it’s me, and I’m Matthew, and here I am, in the kitchen, in the night – the old river mouth of light – and I’m punching and punching away. The house is quiet around me.
As it is, everyone else is asleep.
I’m at the kitchen table.
It’s me and the typewriter – me and the old TW, as our longlost father said our long-lost grandmother used to say. Actually, she’d called it the ol’ TW, but such quirks have never been me. Me, I’m known for bruises and level-headedness, for height and muscle and blasphemy, and the occasional sentimentality. If you’re like most people, you’ll wonder if I’d bother stringing a sentence together, let alone know anything about the epics, or the Greeks. Sometimes it’s good to be underestimated that way, but even better when someone sees it. In my case, I was lucky:
For me there was Claudia Kirkby.
There was a boy and a son and a brother.
Yes, always for us there was a brother, and he was the one – the one of us amongst fi ve of us – who took all of it on his shoulder. As ever, he’d told me quietly, and deliberately, and of course he was on the money. There was an old typewriter buried in the old backyard of an old-backyard-of-a-town, but I’d had to get my measurements right, or I might dig up a dead dog or a snake instead (which I did, on both counts). I figured if the dog was there and the snake was there, the typewriter couldn’t be far.
It was perfect, pirateless treasure.
I’d driven out the day after my wedding day.
Out from the city.
Right through the night.
Out through the reams of empty space, and then some.
The town itself was a hard, distant storyland; you could see it from afar. There was all the straw-like landscape, and marathons of sky. Around it, a wilderness of low scrub and gum trees stood close by, and it was true, it was so damn true: the people sloped and slouched. This world had worn them down.
It was outside the bank, next to one of the many pubs, that a woman told me the way. She was the uprightest woman in town.
‘Go left there on Turnstile Street, right? Then straight for say two hundred metres, then left again.’
She was brown-haired, well-dressed, in jeans and boots, plain red shirt, an eye shut tight to the sun. The only thing betraying her was an inverse triangle of skin, there at the base of her neck; it was tired and old and criss-crossed, like the handle of a leather chest.
‘You got it then?’
‘Got it.’
‘What number you lookin’ for, anyway?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Oh, you’re after the old Merchisons, are you?’
‘Well, to tell you the truth, not really.’
The woman came closer and I noted the teeth of her now, how they were white-and-gleaming-but-yellow; a lot like the swaggering sun. As she approached, I held my hand out, and there was she and I and her teeth and town.
‘My name’s Matthew,’ I said, and the woman, she was Daphne.
By the time I was at the car again, she’d turned and come back, from the money machine at the bank. She’d even left her card behind, and stood there now, with a hand at centre-hip. I was halfway into the driver’s side and Daphne nodded and knew. She knew near to almost everything, like a woman reading the news.
‘Matthew Dunbar.’
She said it, she didn’t ask.
There I was, twelve hours from home, in a town I’d never set foot in in all my thirty-one years, and they’d all been somehow expecting me.

Bridge of Clay is an epic portrait of how a ramshackle family, held together by stories and by love, come to unbury one boy’s tragic secret.

The Secret Network Of Nature: Interesting Secret Networks of Nature

Posted on by Penguin India

The natural world is a web of intricate connections, many of which go unnoticed by humans. But it is these connections that maintain nature’s finely balanced equilibrium.
Drawing on the latest scientific discoveries and decades of experience as a forester and bestselling author, Peter Wohlleben shows us, in his new book titled The Secret Network of Nature, how different animals, plants, rivers, rocks and weather systems cooperate, and what’s at stake when these delicate systems are unbalanced.
Here are two interesting secret networks of nature that we find in his book:
Wolves and the Course of Rivers
In the nineteenth century, people began to systematically eradicate wolves in Yellowstone, the first national park in the United States. This was primarily in response to pressure from ranchers in the surrounding areas, who were worried about their grazing livestock.
“No sooner was the pressure from predators lifted than elk populations began to increase steadily, and large areas of the park were stripped bare by the voracious animals. Riverbanks were particularly hard hit. The juicy grass by the river  disappeared, along with all the saplings growing there. Now this desolate landscape didn’t provide enough food even for birds, and the number of species declined drastically. Beaves were among the losers, because they depend not only on water but also on the trees that grow by the river – willows and poplars are some of their favourite foods. They cut them down so they can get at the trees’ nutrient-rich new growth, which they devour with relish. Because all the young deciduous trees alongside the water were ending up in the stomachs of hungry elk, the beavers had nothing to gnaw on, and they disappeared.
Riverbanks became wastelands, and without any vegetation to protect the ground, seasonal flooding washed away ever-increasing quantities of soil. Erosion advanced rapidly. As a result, the rivers began to meander more and follow increasingly winding paths through the landscape. And the less protection from the underlying layers of soil, the more pronounced the serpentine tendency, especially in the flat landscape.”
Salmon and Trees
“Young salmon swim out into the ocean, where they remain for two to four years. They hunt and hang out, but mostly what they are doing is getting bigger and fatter. On the north-west coast of North America there are a number of different species of salmon, of which the king salmon is the largest. After its youthful years at sea, a full-grown kind can be up to 1.5 meters long and weigh up to 30 kilograms. After scouring the vastness of the ocean in search of food, not only has it built up a lot of muscle, but it has also stored a lot of fat, which it will need to survive its strenuous journey back to the river where it was born.
Salmon battle their way against the current towards the headwaters of these rivers, sometimes for many hundreds of miles and up numerous waterfalls. They carry considerable quantities of nitrogen and phosphorus in their bodies, but these nutrients are of no significance to the salmon themselves. The only reason they are toiling their way upstream is so they can spawn, in the one and only frenzy of passion they will ever experience, and then finally breathe their last.
Over the course of their journey, the salmon’s silvery skin loses its metallic sheen and takes on a reddish hue. The fish are no longer eating, and as they deplete their stores of fat they are steadily losing weight. Using the last of their strength, they mate in their natal streams, and then, exhausted, they die. For the forest all around and its inhabitants, the salmon run means it’s time to get out and haul in the catch. Lining the riverbanks are hungry hunters – bears. And along the Pacific coast of North America, this means black bears and brown bears. The fish they catch from the rapids as the salmon fight their way upstream help them put on a thick layer of fat for the winter.
Depending on location and timing, the salmon have already lost some weight by the time they’re caught. At first the bears eat most of their catch, but later in the season they get choosier. They still scoop skinny salmon out of the water – fish that have used up their fat reserves and therefore contain fewer calories – but if the fish don’t contain much fat, the bears don’t eat much of them, and the carcasses they discard five many other animals the opportunity of a meal. Mink, foxes, birds of prey and a myriad of insects pounce on the lightly nibbled remains and drag them father into the undergrowth.
After mealtime, some parts of the salmon (such as the bones and the head) are left lying around to fertilise the soil directly. A lot of nitrogen is also distributed through the faeces the animals expel after their feast, and overall the amount of nitrogen that ends up in the forests alongside salmon streams is enormous. According to their detailed molecular analyses, reported scientists Scott M. Gende and Thomas P. Quinn, up to 70 per cent of the nitrogen in vegetation growing alongside these streams comes from the ocean – in other words, from salmon. Their data also show that nitrogen from salmon speeds up the growth of trees to such an extent that Sitka spruce in these areas grow up to three times faster than they would have without the fish fertiliser. In some trees, more than 80 per cent of the nitrogen they contain can be traced back to fish. How can we know this so precisely? The key is the isotope nitrogen-15, which in the Pacific Northwest is found almost exclusively in the ocean – or in fish.”

The Secret Network on Nature gives us a chance to marvel at the inner workings and unlikely partnerships of the natural world, where every entity has its own distinct purpose.

What Is Religion, and How Do Economists Think about It? – an Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Religion has not been a popular target for economic analysis. Yet the tools of economics can offer deep insights into how religious groups compete, deliver social services, and reach out to potential converts-how, in daily life, religions nurture and deploy market power.
Here is an excerpt from Sriya Iyer’s book, The Economics of Religion in India.

It is 6 a.m. in the South Indian temple town of Swamimalai. The temple is buzzing with activity: priests in traditional dress chant holy scriptures in harmony; sticks of sandalwood incense and oil lamps are lit till they glow brightly; vendors hawk their wares loudly, selling fruits, flowers, and garlands to adorn the temple idols. The idols themselves are bathed in milk and honey and dressed for the day in beautiful rainbow- colored silks, bedecked with jewels. The smell of sweet rice and jaggery cooking together for the morning prasadam (an offering to the gods) fills the air. And yet for all its beauty and grandeur, the exotic sights and smells of a South Indian temple at dawn is just another early morning ritual for the residents of this little town on the banks of the Kaveri River— a heady cocktail of prayer, jasmine, roses, sandalwood, jaggery, oil, and ghee that is believed to preserve and protect them forever.
The aim of this book is to discuss why economists need to be concerned about bringing their insights and methods to bear on the study of religion, and how this might be helpful for development policy— not just in India, with which this book is primarily concerned, but also in other countries characterized by religious pluralism. In The Religion We Need, the distinguished Indian philosopher of religion Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan wrote that religion “is an expression of the spiritual experience of a race, a record of its social evolution, an integral element of the society in which it is
found” (1928, 25). Almost forty years after Radhakrishnan wrote his book, two sociologists of religion, Charles Glock and Rodney Stark, defined religion in Religion and Society in Tension as “what societies hold to be sacred, comprises an institutionalized system of symbols, beliefs, values, and practices focused on questions of ultimate meaning” (1965, 4). Scholars have grappled for centuries with the question of how to define religion. For economists, definitions are central to the process of modeling. Yet the vast scholarship on defining religion suggests that it is not possible to define it precisely. Of course, there are very famous textbook definitions that social
scientists agree are helpful in this respect. Émile Durkheim’s definition of religion is usually considered one the most famous: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden— beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (1915, 4).
Economists use economic theories to understand religion and draw upon both theoretical and empirical economics to help elucidate religious practice and religious change. This chapter draws upon literatures in sociology, philosophy, and history to discuss these issues and illustrate how economists can make useful contributions to existing thinking on religion and its role in society. For example, I explore issues such as the secularization hypothesis; the relationship between religious pluralism and religious participation; why some religions appear to become more flexible or accommodating as they evolve over time, while others develop more fundamentalist groups of adherents; and the resilience of religion (Stark and Finke 2002). I also discuss the manner in which religion contributes significantly to the building of norms and networks among populations. I contrast these economic theories, which claim to account for the resilience of religion, with theories from other disciplines such as those involving family socialization, social networks, and a belief in otherworldly or supernatural elements. The key aim of the book is to view the persistence of religion in societies not merely as the outcome of largely sociological processes, but also as a rational economic response to changes in the political, ecological, and economic environments in which religions operate. The competitive, adaptive, pluralistic, and fragmented character of Hinduism makes the economic approach both particularly helpful and indeed necessary for understanding religion in India. Moreover, while much academic research has been devoted and is being devoted to the study of Christianity and Islam, relatively little work, at least in economics, is devoted to the study of Hinduism. This book attempts to fill that gap in the literature.

The Economics of Religion in India has much to teach us about India and other pluralistic societies the world over, and about the power of economics to illuminate some of societies’ deepest beliefs and dynamics.

Shot in the Dark

Posted on by Penguin India

by Aslesha Kadian

30 May 1999.
Kriti was restless. She was hovering around her mother who was packing at a frantic pace. They were to leave for Srinagar in a couple of hours to spend the summer vacations with her father who was commanding a battalion about a 100 km north of the city.
It had been seven months since she last saw him. The calls had not been very regular either. She was looking forward to cutting her tenth birthday cake with him in three days. She missed him.
Her grandfather, who she fondly called Kaku, was to drop them to the airport.
Minutes later, her mother shoved her into the bathroom. Kriti had picked out her purple t-shirt that her father loved. They had spoken that morning and he had promised to be at the airport.
Hours later, they landed in Srinagar. Two tall, uniformed men whisked them away from the aircraft and into a Gypsy. Her father wasn’t there. Well, he will be at the camp, she consoled herself. Even Shamir, his right-hand man and shadow, wasn’t there.
Shamir was a Kashmiri. Kriti loved his grey eyes and was very fond of him. He had taught her many badminton tricks and shown her how to pick ripe cherries straight from the trees. He had a daughter who was the same age.
Kriti hated the bulletproof vehicles. They were suffocating. There were not even any windows she could peep out of, just tiny spaces from where the mouths of the AK-47s jutted out.
She didn’t know when she dozed off. The next thing she remembered was being scooped out of the Gypsy by her father. She almost didn’t recognize him because of his beard, but the twinkle in his eyes was the same. Right behind him was Shamir, holding out a toffee for her.
After a while, when her father finally put her down, she clutched on to his waist as he took her mother and her around the small camp. Shamir was close behind at all times. The camp was the same as the others she had seen. The accommodation in one corner, a long tent that doubled up as the officers’ mess and the basketball and badminton courts in another corner.
She felt like she was in familiar territory. Hopping and skipping, she raced up to their room that would be home for the next few weeks. From the window, she could see the snow-peaked mountains in the distance. But she knew that once it was dark they would have to draw the dark curtains and avoid switching on the bright tube light. Her father said it drew attention and could make them potential targets.
She slept early that day. The next two days were spent prancing around the camp with Shamir. The evenings were spent gulping down glass after glass of Coca-Cola, all the time fearing her mother would find out.
On the eve of her birthday, her father had organized a small party in the officers’ mess. Though there was nobody her age there, she was enjoying the attention. At some point, in the midst of the glasses clinking, she fell asleep.
She woke up to hear bullets being fired. She crept out of bed and walked to the window. Were that sparks darting across the boundary wall? Her mother came out of the bathroom and pulled her away from the window. Kriti knew her father was out there. She put her hand under his pillow. Yes, his rifle was missing. He was definitely out there. But where? Behind the camp were orchards. It seemed scary even during the day. She dreaded the thought of stepping into it in pitch darkness. She got into bed and hugged her mother tight.
Minutes later, they heard footsteps. Then there was a knock. Her mother cautiously stepped out of the bed and picked up a thick stick from under the bed. She opened the door an inch. The person on the other side, a tall man in black clothes with a black cloth sweeping across his face, barged in.
Kriti tried screaming but no noise escaped her throat. The man pulled her roughly and threw her over his shoulders. Kriti barely caught a glimpse of her mother. Her face was white. The man raced down the stairs. Her mother followed. Strangely, she wasn’t screaming or shouting.
At the door, she saw Shamir. Kriti extended a hand towards him. His usual smiling face wore a deadpan look. She wanted to ask him where her father was! Why didn’t he try to stop this man who was taking her away!
The man sprinted towards the officers’ mess. She could see Shamir and her mother running behind them. Was Mummy wearing a bulletproof jacket?
The sight of Shamir was comforting for her. She could see his eyes fixed on her unflinchingly.
Just then, the man faltered. It was almost as if someone had pushed him. Kriti, whose hand was holding on to his hair, felt something wet at the base of his neck. She could smell something metallic. She felt dizzy. Her head felt like it would burst. Her half-open eyes desperately searched for her mother and Shamir in the darkness. The man had made it to the tent of the officers’ mess by then. He pushed apart the flap covering the entrance and paused for a second. He turned his head. That was when Kriti saw her mother kneeling down. Shamir! He must have tripped, she thought. She wanted to go check on him and pull her mother and him into the tent.
Inside the tent, the man almost threw her off his back and ran up to the table at the other end. She could see familiar faces all around. She looked at the man in black clothes. His gaze sent a chill down her spine. And then he pulled the black cloth away from his face. She was stunned. She couldn’t believe what she saw.
The man was her father! And then she saw the blood. His ear was bleeding. She could see his black shirt glistening because of the blood. She didn’t know whether she was scared or relieved.
Just then her mother ran inside, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her mother was fine, but where was Shamir! Was he hurt? Why wasn’t her father going to help him? Where was the doctor?
She heard a few more shots and then there was silence. All the lights had been switched off. Her father grabbed a torch and headed out. He came back within minutes. Kriti ran to him. His face was wet. Was he crying? Why?
Moments later, two soldiers came in with a body. Her father knelt beside it. His head was bent forward. Was he praying? Kriti walked up to him; nobody stopped her. She hid behind her father, peeking out from behind him.
Shamir lay motionless. There was a hole in his forehead. Her father pulled her close. She managed to speak up. ‘Dad?’
‘He always joked that he would take a bullet for me. Today, he actually did.’ With that, a tear made its way down her father’s face.
That was the last time Kriti saw Shamir, but she never forgot his smile.
The next day, a new man walked behind her father. He did the same things that Shamir did for him; he even tried to befriend Kriti and take her out for a few basketball shots. But it wasn’t the same, neither for her, nor for her father.

A Game Changer's Memoir – an Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Highly admired for his outstanding credentials as the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) Chairman, G.N. Bajpai was hastily appointed as the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) during one of its most turbulent times between 2002 and 2005. A focused regulator, he revamped the entire organization and introduced reforms and measures of global standards causing the security markets to make major leaps which had so far been inconceivable. He played a substantial role in helping India emerge as a highly competitive, immensely lucrative and influential capital market.
A masterful strategist, Bajpai, in his book, A Game Changer’s Memoir recounts his truly inspiring journey as he weaved through complex rules and frameworks in his efforts to turn SEBI into an effective financial regulator for the country.
Here is an excerpt!

“The first two years of my tenure were spent focusing on bringing in reforms like T+2, STP, fast-tracking quasi-judicial proceedings, and letting the hurricane of Scam 2001 calm down. It is only in the latter part of my tenure that I started making the rounds of investor forums across the world. I went to Singapore,
Hong Kong, New York, London and other international financial centres to market the India growth story to FIIs. After all, theIndian capital market was competitively efficacious and was growing by leaps and bounds. It provided ample opportunities to investors to profit from the continuing economic reforms in the country. And I was also aware that our presence at the global forums was low-key compared with that of other countries. I wanted to send out a message saying how strong we were.
In 2004 the UPA came to power and P. Chidambaram became the finance minister, and therefore also a member (as India’s representative) on the Board of Governors of World Bank (WB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), IMF, and the like. He made it a point to be there at all global forums, like the WB, ADB and IMF meetings. He raised the level of India’s participation in investor forums by attending them himself, and SEBI became an inseparable part thereof. Consequently, my presence too increased at various global investor forums. As we will see, this turned out to be quite helpful, and the practice is continued even now.
The Taxation Issue Faced by FIIs
For the first global investor meet, an informal forum with fund managers in New York, the FM asked me to join him too. … I decided to join the New York and London forums and travelled there just for a day each. These forums were attended by many investors, FIIs and some big broking houses like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. After the formal talks, there were one-to-one meetings, where two groups of fund managers focused on the subject of taxation. One issue regarded the capital gains tax that FIIs were required to pay on their share purchases and sales in the Indian stock markets. They did not have an issue with the tax per se, but they had complaints about its timing. Capital gains are taxed, as the name suggests, when a gain is made, and gain is known when a transaction is complete. The completion of a transaction may happen after a gap of many years, and the exact tax liability remains unknown till well after completion of the transaction and assessment of liability by the assessing officer.
This is owing to the fact that there is generally a gap between filing the income tax return and the assessment. In a typical transaction, the FIIs buying/selling shares in Indian markets through Indian brokers complete their usual Indian tax return formalities for the year at the end of the year, pay their self-assessed liability (on a tax consultant’s advice) and go on about their normal business. (It is to be noted that no tax was required to be paid at the time of transaction). After a few years, when assessment is made, capital gains tax liability (in most cases additional) springs up on these FIIs. This put FIIs in a bit of a jeopardy. FIIs are institutions executing securities transactions on behalf of customers or investors who are the persons liable to pay tax. But most of the time, these customers having cashed out and gone, it becomes well-nigh impossible for FIIs to recover, after several years, the tax levied on them by the Indian Tax Authorities from their end investors. Since the investors represented by these FIIs have closed their transactions with the FIIs, made their profits and moved out, there was no way that FIIs could deduct the tax liabilities from their payments to these investors. This was because the actual (not estimated) liability was not determined before the end customers closed their transactions with the FIIs. And even if these FIIs went back to those investors to recover the tax, the investors would not oblige them, leaving the FIIs to bear the tax burden.
The suggestion towards a solution was to levy something upfront, at the time of the transaction. The FIIs would then deduct the tax liability from their investors and then pay the Indian tax authorities. We heard them out and came back to India, determined to solve the problem. Later, I also got to know that there was a number of pending legal cases in India which were pertaining to such tax issues between FIIs and the investors they represented. Until I started attending these forums myself, I never got to know about these taxation issues. What the FII representatives told me was a common complaint at many such global investor forums. Even domestic institutional investors (DII) in India had the same complaint. Now, since the FM himself was present at most of these forums, he too understood the problem and started exploring ways to tackle it…”

Easy-flowing and readable with the writer’s anecdotal and educative style of writing and yet greatly comprehensive, this is a go-to book for a new generation of aspiring financial groundbreakers.

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